"Andrew Dalke" <dalke at dalkescientific.com> writes:
> Michael Hudson:
> >But they very much take their lead from CPython, so Tim's points all
> >remain valid. Well, except for vyper, but that doesn't have enough
> >influence to count (perhaps unfortunately).
>> I recall some of the conversation when (then) JPython was being
> developed, on making sure the documentation didn't require
> implementation-specific functionality. So there is *some*
> standard-like documentation.
>> What's needed to call something a standard?
>> I don't know of a C++ compiler which fully meets the C++ standard.
> (They all seem to have bits of 'oh, we don't do that yet'.)
>> So I figured three different implementations (C, Java and OCaml)
> with no shared run-time environment was enough to disprove Tim's
> statement:
>> ] there is only one implementation, and the language
> ] is defined implicitly by that implementation
>> For Python, would it be better to say
>> there are several implementations, and the language is mostly
> defined by the documentation, but the other implementations
> defer to the C implementation, distribution, and developers in
> matters of interpretation.
> ?
>> Tim's point was that standardizing a library is a complicated and
> expensive process. My point is that the Python library
> (standardized or not) works with quite different runtimes. Why
> aren't there similarly widely used though non-standard libraries
> for CL for "doing stuff like internet programming"? [Paul Rubin]
>> For example, back in the Perl4 days when CGI programming first
> became hot, just about everyone used cgi-lib.pl even though it
> wasn't part of the standard Perl library, and this was pre-CPAN.
Historical cruft? The evolution of the languages have been different.
The presence of strong vendors in the CL camp does (IMHO) work as a
disincentive to community wide standardization.
On top of that add the dwindling support for CL as a whole,
irrespective of the technical merits of the language itself.
Things are changing, yet slowly. This is just the way things are.
As for "widely used though non-standard libraries for CL for "doing
stuff like internet programming", you can check the CLOCC
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/clocc). Not much, but it is there.
Cheers
--
Marco Antoniotti ========================================================
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